You’ve got to market your side hustle, whether you want to:
- Make money from your passion
- Turn your side project into a full-time income
- Create a new revenue stream that doesn’t take up all your time
The problem is that you don’t have much extra time or money to invest in marketing your side hustle. So, what can you do to hit your goals? There are plenty of free ways to market your side hustle that don’t take up a lot of time. These are five of my favorites.
- Clarify your website
You need a place for people to go to learn about what you do. If you already have a website, there’s no need to spend anything extra. If you don’t have a website yet, plenty of website builders, from WordPress to Wix to GoDaddy and more, have a free version to help you get started.
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The biggest problem I see with side hustles, small businesses, and startups who are struggling to grow is this: no one understands what you do. Sometimes that’s because you can’t articulate it, and sometimes it’s because you’re using fancified language to explain it. Remember: confused people don’t buy.
Already know exactly what you do and who you do it for? Clarify your website copy by:
- Removing all buzzwords and industry jargon
- Talking to customers about what you do, asking them to explain it back to you, and then using their words on your website (they always simplify it)
- Stating specifically that you provide XYZ product or service for ABC type of person
- Adding pricing to your website, or at least give people an expected range
- Showing screenshots, videos, or diagrams of your work; people want to see it before they commit
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- Get active on social media
You’ve got to be where your customers are, and your customers—whoever they are—spend time on social media. You don’t need to be on every platform, though. Pick the one platform where your target audience spends the most time, and follow these three steps:
- Post regularly, if not daily (ideas below)
- Comment on others’ content, especially if it’s relevant to what you do, and generally be an engaged member of the platform
- Share your content with friends, customers and other contacts, and ask them to engage with it
This will help you build an audience and drive potential customers to your website, who—now that you’ve clarified your website—will want to work with you. You don’t have to be super professional in your content, either, at least not as you get started.
To get started, pull together questions you get from customers and others you talk to. Each of those questions should create at least one social media post opportunity where you can address the question and provide an answer. Also, be sure to create posts about what exactly it is that you do, who it’s for, and why people should work with you. Third, create how-to posts or day-in-the-life content showing how people can fix their problems (with your help) and what working with you actually looks like.
Whether you should create this content as short videos, long videos, short text posts, long text posts, pictures, or some combination is up to you. Do what’s easiest. All good things take time to build, but this is free marketing that works.
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- Directly reach out to people
I get it. Selling can be intimidating. But you’re building a business, and you can’t expect people to want to work with you if you don’t ask them. You need to start as many conversations with your ideal customers as you can.
The conversations don’t necessarily need to start salesy. We’re talking about marketing, after all, and this is more about creating a presence in your market. But start conversations, get to know people, ask them about their work or interests or problems or whatever’s relevant to the product or service you’re providing. Build relationships. Then, as appropriate, ask them to buy.
More people will say “no” than will say “yes.” That’s okay. Keep going. Not only will you eventually become the go-to option and earn a lot of sales from this, but you’ll also learn more about your market and how to best serve it than you could have imagined. Even starting five conversations a day could exponentially catapult your side hustle into a real business.
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- Focus on reviews, early and often
Online reviews dictate whether people trust you, whether they find you when they search online, and whether they actually pay you. As soon as you have customers having good experiences, start asking for and earning reviews. In most cases, Google is the best place to get reviews. To do so:
- Create a Google Business page
- Get your review link (view your profile, click “Get more reviews” and copy the link)
- Send an email or SMS message to each customer asking them to leave you a review
- Respond to every review
- Act on any critical feedback (improve your offering or processes)
- Repurpose those reviews as social media content and as social proof on your website
The more reviews you get, the more returns you’ll see, and it doesn’t take long before this makes a significant impact on your side hustle.
- Blog, and become good at search engine optimization (SE
Yes, online reviews will help you be found in search results, but you also need to be actively building authority for your website. The more quality pages you add to your website related to your core topic, the more likely you are to show up in search results—both for specific product searches and for general questions about your topic.
If you’re new to blogging for SEO, you need to first understand how SEO works. Then, you can take the content you’re creating for social media (as in point 2 above) and turn that content into blog posts.
One approach here that works well for others is to post on social media each weekday, and to bring those five pieces of social media content together into one blog post. For instance, let’s say your side hustle is consulting with small businesses or local enterprises about how to improve their marketing. You might discuss one marketing problem local enterprises face on social media each day, and then create a blog post on five local enterprise marketing problems and how to fix them. This way, you’re creating one new and valuable blog post each week, using content that you’ve already created for social. That’s free and it doesn’t take too much time.
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How should you approach these free marketing tactics?
Each of the free marketing tactics shared in this post are things you should be doing, but you don’t have to start doing them all immediately. You need to walk before you run, so take them one at a time.
For instance, you might clarify your website first, since that could be a one-time thing that would set you up for success. Then start asking customers for Google reviews, and just make that part of your standard process. Then choose to either start blogging or being active on social media, do that every day for the next 30 days, and then you might add in starting those customer conversations.
Whatever you do, though, just be sure to take one step forward. To turn your dream into revenue, you’ve got to take that step.
Photo by Vanessa Garcia
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